The O-Zone

Hard to believe, but it can happen.

Last summer we visited a pair of Bald Eagles who have a nest on a cliff overlooking the water. A spectacular view to be sure!!

They have trained a neighboring human after much effort to provide a snack, using Jedi mind control. Humans are slow so it takes much focus and patience.

Their pet human feels the vibration in the force, and goes to the store to purchase chicken thighs, which are kept safely in the refrigerator. The next vibrations inspire the human to take the offerings out of the fridge and put them on a place.

Finally! The human walks out onto the deck and whistles, letting the Eagle family know that he’s ready to perform his (only) trick.

The matriarch jumps off her perch first.

Followed moments later by her mate.

She always takes precedence in such matters.

Strong and steady, their wings carry them towards the house and up.

They watch to make sure everything is going according to plan.

They were not very far over our heads.

Close enough to hear the sounds of their wings.

Intent on the business at hand.

Then they begin their dive, crossing the peak of the roof.

And it’s time for the human to perform.  He tosses the offering high into the air.

Swoosh! She catches her piece while her mate hangs back. Across the lawn she goes, towards the cliff.

Now it’s her mate’s turn, and he missed! No matter, a slight adjustment in his dive and he snatches his just desserts from the grass and follows her back to their home.

The human can’t get it right all of the time, but does alright for a mere human.

The human is released from his trance and is allowed to proceed with whatever it is humans do when not occupied with their proper duties.

Our friend David has an amazingly beautiful home in an amazingly beautiful location, and the honor to have these magnificent birds as close neighbors.  We were honored to be allowed to watch this interaction between species.  It was a really good trick!!

A couple of weeks ago, we finally got the back yard ready for fall.  The landscaper who built the patio and fire pit came back and they completed the gazebo project we’d started a couple of weeks earlier.  Once I fell off the ladder, that put an end to our efforts to put it up ourselves.

We managed to connect two upright posts together with a cross piece, but trying to get all four connected was impossible with just two people. After I fell off a ladder, that was the end of our attempts.

The instructions said, “Requires four adults.”  Oh well, they were right!

All completed and bolted down to the footers in the patio with concrete bolts, this should stand up to fairly high winds.

We haven’t built a fire yet but it’s on our list of things to do.  I bought marshmallows!

This is the path from the back deck to the gazebo.

Looking back at the deck from under the gazebo.

This is where the garden will go. Terraces for the raised beds, then an area for fruit bushes and vines, and then six fruit trees will go farthest down and next to the fence.

Next to the orchard is another gate which takes you to the front deck.

Looking back up the garden showing both paths that make the circle for walking. The plan is to fill the grounds inside the path with flowers.

The Big Leaf Maple trees have lost their leaves.

The leaves were falling a lot, this particular day, and some were getting hung up in the fence.  I actually took this picture before the gazebo was built.  Under the tarps were all the pieces still be to assembled.

Every time the wind blew, there would be this rustling sound and a bunch of leaves would swirl into the air.  It was neat!

Last week there was a sunrise.  Since we’re so surrounded by trees it’s somewhat unusual for us to see a sunrise.  It has to be pretty bright for us to notice.  The sun wasn’t up, and it was kind of a misty/foggy morning and the water droplets in the air were reflecting the sunrise in the sky.

And it turned the whole world this amazing rose color.

I didn’t have time to set up a tri-pod so my picture is a bit fuzzy.  I just barely had enough time to run and grab the camera.  This color only lasted a couple of minutes, and I was not the least bit sure I’d be able to capture the colors, but I lucked out.

To celebrate fall I made a batch of sweet rolls.

It was a long spring, summer, and now well into fall since the last time I wrote anything.  Remodeling just took all my mental energies away.

But at last we’re finished with the exterior repairs and replacements.

West view of the house from the driveway prior to work beginning.

Everything looked just blah, and it was worse than that.  The deck, roofing, railing, and siding all needed to be fixed.  The railing was pretty unsafe.  Leaning on it was a bad idea as it could have simply fallen over, as the guys discovered when they removed it.  It was scary easy to do!

View of the southern windows, which I think of as the front of the house even though you don’t see this when you drive into the property.  The house is level, but my camera holding skills are a bit suspect.

The spring day I took this picture, we were building the infrastructure for the Purple Martin houses.  The blue tarp was protecting the concrete we had poured to hold the metal post that holds the martin houses so that the forecast rains didn’t mess anything up.

This was late April, after the snows finally melted; none of the trees had leafed out quite yet.

So fast forward six months.

A more cheerful looking house!  And fall colors.  And still the sky is cloudy just like it was in the spring.  The Big Leaf Maple trees are all turning color and dropping huge leaves all over the yard.  Some of those leaves are 12 inches across.

Yesterday the contractors finally finished installing the railings on the deck, which was the last thing on our to-do list.  Well, except putting the gazebo together in the back garden, but that’s next weeks’ project.

Dan is holding Mishkin, standing in the window watching me take a picture 🙂

If we ever decide we’ve lost our minds, this is the view from the pond.

Next year is all about the garden.  The fencing is just great, and almost not noticeable to the right of the house.  And there is a gate right off this door on the south side of the house, down the rebuilt stairs which are actually comfortable to walk up and down unlike the old stairs which I avoided if at all possible.  And you’ll end up in the midst of the orchard part of the garden.   I was dreaming about raspberry plants this morning.  And we can plant flowers and bushes!

So new roof, new deck and railing, new gutters which actually drain because they were installed properly, replaced siding, and everything was painted and stained.  We had already replaced light fixtures and exterior doors when we remodeled the inside.  The only thing that is left is the furnace and heat pump.  Hopefully that will not need to be done for a couple more years.

Happiness is being done.

We decided shoveling a path to the bird feeders was better than trying to tromp around on snowshoes.

Oh look! I found a stair!

Oh look! I found green grass!!

I was standing in well over two feet of snow at that point.

Oh look! I’m getting really poohed. For something so light and fluffy, this white stuff is heavy.

Finally I reached my goal and shoveled some areas around the feeders, but not all the way to the grass.  I left a good foot of snow on the ground so that when the birds were feeding they wouldn’t be down in a hole and could keep an eye out for predators.  We had Cooper’s Hawk here yesterday and Juncos are excellent snack food for those guys

Happy birds taking full advantage of the bounty.

Since we put out the seeds, we’ve had Juncos, Rufous-sided Towhee, Varied Thrush, Flicker, Downy Woodpecker.  The new seeds will get buried but that won’t bother the birds; they’ll simply dig them out.

And we even put some seeds on the porch by the sliding glass door so our cat has a full day of watching the Bird Channel on Kitty-TV.

Best of all, the snowshoes have maintained their primary use of being a wall hanging (someday whenever I get around to doing that with them.

Normally this area gets four inches of snow a year.  Total.  And that’s probably five days’ worth when it is actually snowing enough to stick on the ground.

The front door deck had been shoveled and was mostly melted off on Friday morning (yesterday) when it started snowing.

Two feet of new snow.  And it is still snowing and supposed to keep snowing today, tomorrow, and Monday.  Good thing we went grocery shopping on Thursday afternoon!!

One of our intrepid Anna’s Hummingbirds. These little guys are so tough!!

Yesterday afternoon when I went out to brush snow off the feeder so the hummers could get a drink, I had two of them flying around and through my fingers while I was doing that, until the tough one (shown above) decided to chase the other one off from “his” flowers.  They weren’t the least bit concerned about what I was doing.

I need to take some seeds out to the seed feeders today for the Juncos, Varied Thrush, Towhee, and Purple Finch.  I’m going to need to use our snowshoes.  Good thing I brought them with us from Curlew.  I was planning on just using them as a wall hanging.  Not actually having to USE THEM!

I’m not sure where January went, but it’s gone.  And February is blurring past pretty fast as well.

Last weekend it started snowing, just a couple of days and we ended up with a good fat six inches of snow on the ground.

The driveway after the snow stopped and the sky turned blue. It was cold!  Temperatures in the low 20’s.

Then we thought, no worries, that was winter.  A few days of snow, then the temperatures started to warm up again and there was green grass peeking up again under the trees and some daffodils were starting to come up.

Starting today, however, four days of snow.

Front deck and railing. Ye gads.  And it is still pouring down snow.   Good thing we don’t need to go do anything right now.

I guess tomorrow I’m going to fix a big pot of black bean chili and some cornbread.  That sounds like a good winter thing to do.

Even on a day like today, the windows let in a ton of light.

It will all melt in a couple of weeks, most likely, and probably all at once.

A perfect day to go for a walk in old growth and visit a water fall.

A tiny bay on Lake Crescent, a very deep cold lake surrounded on all sides by mountains.

We parked at Storm King Ranger Station on Lake Crescent in the Olympic National Park, and took the path to a tunnel which goes under Highway 101.  It was definitely like going back in time to when all the woods around the Peninsula looked like this.

While we were getting our coats and boots on for our walk, we could hear a small group of crazy people wearing bathing suits, trying to get their nerve up to jump into the lake.  By the time we walked around the side of the lake and were ready to cross under the road, they were still fidgeting around on the dock, hugging themselves, but not jumping into the water.

Big Leaf Maple  at least four feet in diameter at on the trunk of the tree.

This Big Leaf Maple tree is covered in a thick layer of moss. It’s kind of hard to believe it can support any leaves but it does, out on the ends of its branches, large dinner plate sized leaves.  The books we’ve read say some of these trees carry as much weight in moss as the tree themselves weigh.  The moss is almost an irredescent green, especially if the sunlight illuminates it.  We had clouds this day, a cool 37F when we started on the trail.

Large sword ferns are several feet long and can cover a pretty wide circumference.

Sword ferns are only one of the types of ferns in these temperate rain forest woods.  This type is abundant and evergreen.

Wide graveled trail was not the least bit muddy.

Smaller trees line the trail, surrounding the large trees which are scattered around in the woods.  Even on days like this, cloudy but not actively raining, there is a misty atmosphere in the damp woods.  We saw a scattering of birds on our trip, Varied Thrush, Pacific Wren (bleah, I liked the old Winter Wren name better), chickadees, Nuthatches tooting their little horn sound, Ravens calling from high overhead in the canopy.

A tree hugger. Definitely.

Hugging a giant tree 12 feet in diameter and hundreds of years old is kind of magical.

Long way up!

Looking up a couple hundred feet tall, this big old fellow is missing a lot of height and branches.

Looking upstream.

This is the creek fed, in part, by the Marymere falls.  See that large tree bridging the creek up river from where we’re standing?  Dan told me we got to walk across that log.  I told him I’d wait for him to come back 🙂

Looking downstream from the same spot on the bank.

The water is fast, and cold, and totally clear.  You can see the rocks lining the creek bed, through the white water.

This looked like a wonderful spot to sit on the bank on a hot summer day and put your feet into the cold water.

Another view of the creek where the trail got closer to the creek, before turning and heading further into the woods.

Really lush vegetation even in the dead of winter.

Our first view of the falls, this is a lower and much smaller height waterfall.

Marymere Falls is not a very large waterfall but it makes up for lack of size by how beautiful it is and also the surrounding canyon walls.

Standing on a platform next to the falls, it is surprisingly loud in the narrow canyon.

The lower part of the falls threw up an amazing amount of moisture into the air.

The icy cold water created a constant mist in the air, totally refreshing on our faces.

Cold clear water!

Looking down on the tree bridge crossing the creek.  It’s only about ten feet above the surface of the water, but it seemed much higher when looking down over the split log railing.

A tree fell across the creek and some enterprising soul said, “Oh! Let’s saw it in half and make bridge out of it.” One has to wonder if that was before or after his friend fell off the round log.

Dan waiting patiently at the end of the bridge for me to stop messing around, taking pictures and feeling the flexibility of the bridge by bouncing up and down on it.

Totally wonderful place to go walking.

After the falls, we drove to La Push, a small village on the Pacific Ocean coast, had a picnic lunch while sitting in the car, parked on a jetty and watching the waves go crashing into rocks.  We were looking for ocean birds but that day they were off doing something else on some other beach.

Slip one, knit two, yarn over, knit two together, yarn over, knit 5, yarn over, knit two together, yarn over knit two together, knit to end. Yawn!!

In other news, a little while ago I transformed my large fluffy skein of yarn into a ball of yarn, and started my lace knitting project.  I did the math, this was a little over a mile of yarn.  Unfortunately for me, I’m on the extremely boring ‘knit the bottom border’ which is mind numbing in the repetitive nature of it all.  Once I force myself to get done with this (almost half way done), then it becomes much more entertaining and easier to make some progress.

Sunday we went to Port Gamble to visit a museum.  It turned out that the museum wasn’t open, which was not a huge problem as it is a picturesque little town right on the water.  And it had a yarn store.

Yarn stores are dangerous places to go to, but I couldn’t resist at least going in the door.

Kid mohair, 2200 yards of it, which is slightly over a mile of yarn.

Very dangerous place to go into.  I needed to buy more yarn like I need a new hole in my head, but this skein of yarn called out to me.

It was hanging on a coat rack, lovely silvery gray shading into dark coal black.

I could just see a lace shawl with this yarn; so now I have to make time to wind this into a ball of yarn (this weekend maybe), and find my knitting needles and stitch markers, and a book.  I found the end of the yarn so I can wind this skein into a ball of yarn.  That is going to take me hours.

It could have been worse.  It might have been a book store.  Selling knitting books 🙂

Other than changing light fixtures, the kitchen remodeling is now completed.  Only a couple of hiccups in the process, one of which is highly annoying but what can you do when the company you got stuck with from Home Depot sucks.  Don’t ever use Precision Countertops.

This is what the old kitchen looked like prior to remodeling the kitchen and refinishing the floors.  Dark oak cabinets and deep yellow varnish on the red oak flooring made the area seem dreary.

There was an electric cook-top on the left side of the kitchen, dishwasher and wall oven on the right side, and the overhead cabinets over the cook-top split the room and blocked light from the majority of the windows.  And you can see the old french door but you can’t see how it was leaking and ruining the floor, and rusting because it was never painted, just installed with it’s original primed and unpainted finish.

Range is now on the right side of the kitchen, and the dishwasher is on the left side.

Our desks and the dining room table have plenty of room.

And the birds have their cozy spot in the corner next to the pantry.

Without the cooktop taking up a lot of real estate on the peninsula, there is tons of space to spread out stuff when cooking.  And getting rid of the overhead cabinets totally transforms the room.  The pantry cabinets to the right of the kitchen along the wall next to the living room provide ample storage.  All in all, it’s a massive improvement and makes this part of the house really comfortable.  It’s where we will spend the majority of our time during the day.

Today the painter may come to work on the living room, in which case we’ll be moving all the stuff from that room into this one and we’ll be back to total chaos.  He might not show up, though.  The weather looks good and he’s doing exterior painting while it’s not raining, and interior painting when it’s too wet outside.

This large maple tree has turned color and is now busily dropping leaves all around itself, and on top of the storage shed out in the yard. This basically the view out of the window by my desk, and off the back deck.

The picture is a wee bit fuzzy because it wasn’t very light when I took the picture.  You can see where the sun is just touching the top of the trees, painting the fir tree gold.  I scared a hummingbird when I went outside to take pictures this morning.  Sorry birdie!!

The yellow plum tree is just now starting to turn color. It has way too many branches and needs pruning in a bad way. That will be a several years project, to reduce the extra branches and get the tree healthy and producing more fruit.

We ate a few of the plums in late summer and they were very delicious, so it’s worthwhile trying to save the tree.   It will be part of the gardening project for the spring.

And I’ve gotten complaints. Sorry about that!  But this is what happened.

April went by sort of slowly while we waited for snow to melt, and talked about moving to the Olympic Peninsula, which I’d totally fallen in love with last year when we took a trip to the national park. Dan was ambivalent about it, and left it up to me to make up my mind.  One day I’d want to move and the next day I didn’t want to go anywhere. Pretty much that’s what I did all month long.

Then, the early part of May we planned a long weekend at our favorite birding spot at Malheur, and we finally decided to put our house on the market, figuring that it would take a couple of years to find a buyer. We listed it with a realtor on Thursday, and Friday drove to Malheur, not thinking about our house being on the market.  When we came home on Monday we had a phone message from the realtor asking us to give him a call to get some details ironed out on the listing agreement. We were tired so we didn’t call him back, and later that same day he called again.

Dan got the funniest look on his face. He covered up the phone and said, “We have an offer on the house, and the guy wants to know what is our best price.” I said we weren’t going to bid against ourselves, so we wanted full price since it was a very fair price. Dan passed along that message.

We didn’t sleep much that night because truly I hadn’t figured at all on what would happen next whenever we did get an offer, a couple of years down the road.

Tuesday afternoon the realtor called back and said we had an accepted offer at full price to review.  Much stress ensued.

Now we had to find a place to live, someplace an eight hour drive from home, each way.   And we were on the clock!  This pretty much consumed our time for the next month.

We made several trips to the Olympic Peninsula, and made offers on several places, which fell through for one reason or another, before we finally got an accepted offer in early June, and then we had to do all the packing and getting rid of extra things as we were going to be in a house a third smaller than our Curlew house.

In the middle of July we packed the birds and cat into travel cages and cat carrier, stuffed the car with everything it could hold, and hit the highway.  That was a very long eight hour drive.  I had tried for a month to teach the parrots to say “Are we there yet?”   Dan was not amused 🙂

And here we are. Remodeling again. Like Dan says, we’ve been remodeling houses for 20 years, why stop now!

First major project was to get a huge oak bar removed from the family room, which then meant replacing the tile floor underneath it with hardwood flooring to match the rest of the room.  That flooring is still unfinished, and awaiting the rest of the flooring being stripped and refinished.  Sheetrock was damaged and electrical work needed to be addressed.

Other minor projects were completed the first week or two we were here, including a thorough pest inspection and remediation, and replacing the old toilets and washer/dryer.

Next major chore was to replace the old smelly dark brown carpeting with hardwood flooring. That took about a month to accomplish, what with waiting for the flooring to arrive, and then moving everything out of the living room, and two downstairs bedrooms so the flooring guys had room to work. It took them two days, and it’s a vast improvement!!  Once they were done we could move things back into the downstairs rooms and set up a spare bedroom.

Second major project was to replace the front door and french doors out onto to the deck.  Another huge improvement.

Next and largest project was to replace the kitchen in its entirety. It took six weeks for the cabinets to arrive which they did on October 5th. That’s what we’ve been doing this last week.

The refrigerator is new, and everything else is what we were getting rid of, lock stock and barrel.

The family room with our two desks and the dining room table, and the pellet stove which we had installed to replace an old wood stove is in the corner.  You can see the unfinished floor where the bar was located.

We moved everything out of the kitchen/family room and into the living room, except the hutch which is simply too large to move.

Removing everything from the cabinets, and putting it back into boxes, plus the bird cages, and the living room was stuffed to the gills. Fortunately this only lasted a couple of days before we could put the birds back into the family room.

Monday October 8th the kitchen was removed.

Me and the cat hid while this was going on. They made a hell of a noise. The whole room felt way smaller without the kitchen cabinets. An obstacle illusion as Dan likes to say.

A side benefit was we were able to locate and block ingress and egress holes used by mice.  Yay!

The old cabinets are still sitting on our deck waiting for the Habitat for Humanity guys to come pick them up.

Friday the last nobs and pulls were installed on the cabinets, and a piece of plywood was laid on top of the cabinets so we have a work surface.

We had a piece of granite from the counter top we installed in our Bigfork, MT house, and we’re going to be have the same Blue Pearl granite here. We put this next to the electric range so I have a place to set hot pans.

The counter top guy was here on Thursday to make a template for the granite counter top, which will be installed in two weeks.

Without the overhead cabinets blocking the view, the kitchen is now open and feels much larger. We replaced dark oak cabinets with natural maple cabinets.  That’s the new french door.

The parrots are in a corner, next to the pantry cabinets.

The kitchen feels much larger now. Another illusion 🙂

We installed three pantry cabinets to replace the pantry room we had at our last house.  The holes under the cabinets are to provide airflow for  the air return vent in the floor under the cabinets.

Lots of storage space.

This coming Monday the 15th the floor refinishing guys are coming to strip the old finish off the floor and refinish it. That will take two to three days, so once again we have to move everything out of the kitchen and family room and into the living room. Only this time the boxes from the kitchen are no longer cluttering up the living room because this weekend we put everything away in the new cabinets and drawers. Yay!! I can actually find things now. There are still a few boxes in the garage yet to come in but no point until the floor is finished.

We’re hoping that the following week of the 22nd that a painter will show up and paint the kitchen, and then there’s just light fixtures to replace (also in the garage), before the counter top is installed later in the week. If he doesn’t show up, we’ll end of painting it ourselves.

If all goes according to plan by the end of October that room will be finished.

Then it’s just repainting the rest of the house, and replacing light fixtures as we go.

Next year we’ll tackle the outside of the house.

There are two really cool parts about being here. Being next to the national park, and the creek behind our place which is a wild life corridor for all sorts of animals to use from the mountains of the park down to salt water, is really neat.

And having Anna’s Hummingbirds coming to our feeder multiple times each day, and they’ll be here all winter. That is amazing!!

We’ve seen this bobcat several times so far. This time he and Mish stared at each other for a little bit, both their tails twitching back and forth before the bobcat wandered off back towards the creek. We obviously are in the midst of his territory.

Roughly twice the size of Mishkin, and a lot darker fur than the bobcats we saw in Curlew. Those were winter cats, though, so that might be the reason for the darker fur.

Here he is leaving the yard, with one ear back and listening to the house.

Lots of deer go through the yard, and our neighbors tell us that coyotes have a den at the end of our road which they’ve used for many years. Black bears will put in an appearance at some point, but no Elk. They are all either further east, or further west depending on which herd they belong to.

Enough deer are here that a fence around the garden will be required. We’ll figure out a garden this winter.

And on top of all of this I got very sick right after we moved here, and have been spending a lot of time visiting doctors.  So that is why I haven’t been writing lately.